Social networks and other utilities such as content sharing, blogging, e-mail, online communities, and forums have become prevalent in recent years as a popular means for connecting users (including people, businesses, and other entities). Users of social networking websites associate themselves with one or more other users of the social network, thus creating a web of connections among the users of the social networking website. Users of such services are generally connected with each other through social ties such as friends, family, acquaintances, etc. Users may also be connected through one or more common attributes in their profiles, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, hobbies or other attributes.
Users of social networking services, as well as other online services such as email, blogs, and the like, generate online content (hereinafter user-generated content). The user may also post contact information, background information, job information, hobbies, and/or other user-specific data to his or her profile on a social networking website. The profile may include one or more webpages to represent the user information and content added by the user in his or her profile. The content may include multimedia content, audio content, visual content etc. The content may also include any text content generated by the user, such as in an email, blog post, activity on an online community etc. Other users of the social networking website can then access this user-generated content.
In many instances, advertisers leverage the user-generated content by placing advertisements on the webpage(s) showing such content. Often, the advertising fee is directly correlated to the number of times an advertisement is viewed (per-view basis) or the number of times an advertisement is clicked (per-click basis). Therefore, popular user-generated content often leads to greater advertising revenue for a service provider hosting the content. Consequently, the users that generate popular content are more valuable to the service providers. Presently, the social networking service providers lack effective ways of targeting users that generate popular content.